Share this:

Like this:

Vladimir Putin, overheard in conversation with colleagues at the recent G20 meeting, referred to an image of Barack Obama on a video screen and laughed, “He’s a child . . . he’s a child!”

Indeed. West Africans use a simplified version of English that includes nouns that succinctly describe personalities. I’ve already identified Mr. Obama as a confusionist. Another apt west African tag is small boy. (In contrast, a true leader is a big man.)

I was puzzled at first by Obama’s refusal to utter the phrase “radical Islam”, his seeming lack of empathy for the victims of Friday’s massacre in Paris by ISIS, and his insistence that the US accept tens or hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria. It does though make sense when we listen to his own words:

The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.

The sweetest sound I know is the Muslim call to prayer.

We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world — including in my own country.

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam.

Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance.

. . . etcetera

Putin has it right. Obama’s reign of error is that of a child — a narcissistic small boy avenging his father. Such a neurotic character served Shakespeare well, but is unfit to be president.

Both Swope and Obama were elected to office by fools who suffer from chronic white guilt.

In 1969, Putney Swope announced:

The changes I’m gonna make will be minimal. I’m not gonna rock the boat. Rockin’ the boat’s a drag. What you do is sink the boat.

In 2008, Barack Obama bragged:

. . . we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

Mr. Obama is trying to transform America, alright. Transform it from a prosperous capitalist economy governed by a constitutional republic to a bankrupt socialist economy governed by a corrupt tyrannical dictatorship. Barack is following Putney’s credo, “What you do is sink the boat.”

Like this:

This week the New York Post published an excellent article titled Obama has been collecting personal data for a secret race database. Soon after becoming chancellor in 1933, Adolph Hitler initiated a German census, with the assistance of IBM’s German subsidiary. The census used IBM’s Hollerith punch card technology: one card per each person. On this card were fields that defined address, race, religion, and ancestors.

This database probably seemed benign in 1933. A few years later, it powered Krystalnacht and, soon after, the entire holocaust.

After invading Poland, the Nazis immediately began a census. Ditto Holland and France. Again, IBM technology powered these efforts. Tyrannical centralized regimes require detailed demographic data collection and tabulation so that they can select groups and individuals for “special treatment”.

I object to any central government collecting reams of data about its citizens. In particular, I don’t trust this administration. Aside from its dubious motives, it’s proven its inability to safeguard personal data, including fingerprints, of millions of security clearance applicants. It appears that China now has these data.

Exhibit A is FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, who was a lobbyist for both the cable TV and cell phone industries(!). He was also a major Obama political campaign consolidator.

image by Politizoid

Then there’s the IRS, whose managers and IT staff seem to have no clue about disaster recovery planning or routine data recovery procedures. Or are they merely trying to hide evidence of criminal behavior?

For an administration that boasts of its techno-hipness, the appointment of one more windbag to a position that requires technical expertise is pathetic.

WASHINGTON, D.C. –Congressman Steve Stockman Friday asked the National Security Agency to turn over all its metadata on the email accounts of former Internal Revenue Service Exempt Organizations division director Lois Lerner for the period between January 2009 and April 2011.

If the NSA doesn’t comply, the mail servers that Lois Lerner used will have her emails — especially if she used IMAP or webmail. The tape backup systems for those servers should have archives of all of her emails. (A decent backup system will archive everything every month in off-site storage. It’s urgent that these archives be retrieved before they’re purged.)

In addition, chances are excellent that the emails on her crashed hard drive on her PC can be recovered. They just need to call OnTrak data recovery service or any of its competitors.

This attempt to destroy evidence is kind of stupid. As I’ve mentioned before, copies of those messages will reside on the mail servers and their tape backup systems. I gather that the IRS uses Microsoft Exchange mail servers; by default, Microsoft Exchange turns on mail archiving.

25 August 2014 Today Judicial Watch announced that they have been told by DOJ attorneys that backup copies of all federal government documents, including Lois Lerner’s missing emails, exist in federal archives. Judicial Watch intends to file a request for production of these as part of their ongoing lawsuit against the IRS. The judge won’t be happy to learn that the IRS has been hiding evidence.

Judicial Watch’s release includes a link to the latest sworn statement by an IRS IT manager regarding procedures that were followed when Lois Lerner’s hard drive failed. They’re unremarkable except that no detail is provided about the failure itself (was it electronic or logical, was the disk spinning?) or what measures were used to recover data from the failed drive. What’s not addressed are questions such as, “Before scrapping the failed drive, did anyone evaluate the value and uniqueness of its data?” and “What archiving system is used on the Exchange servers used by Ms. Lerner? Can we pull the lost emails from that archive?”.

Again, this reveals incompetence or coverup. Or maybe even an incompetent coverup.

29 July 2014 Yesterday I watched over an hour of recent grilling of the IRS director by the House Government Oversight committee. Apparently one of his staffers recently testified that the data on Ms. Lerner’s hard drive was recoverable, but management had declined to bring in an outside contractor to recover the data.

Incompetence
or
coverup?

I’ve encountered many failed hard drives over the decades — on servers, desktops, and laptops. I’ve always been able to recover the data on them, using a variety of techniques. The worst case required the services of a specialist to pull data from a failed SCO Openserver Unix system disk. I handled all other cases myself. In systems that I’ve managed, we had both automated central backup tape libraries and external backup hard drives for remote laptop users such as Ms. Lerner. We had entire laptops stolen, yet their users lost only data created since they last connected to the enterprise network or their external backup hard drive (whichever was most recent). Even when no backup system is in place, data on failed hard drives is almost always recoverable. The worst case is that it will require expensive surgery in a clean room.

My conclusion:

The I.T. staff at the IRS is incompetent, or

One or more persons at the IRS are trying to hide something that involves Lois Lerner.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton wants the IRS to tell him whatever they know about the hard drive that Lerner says malfunctioned and lost two years of emails sought by congressional investigators, and he wants those answers in just one week.

Walton issued an order Friday afternoon demanding to know the serial number of Lerner’s hard drive and, essentially, where it is now.

The same article announces that

On Thursday, Federal Judge Emmett Sullivan ordered the IRS to make a sworn declaration in writing describing how Lerner could have lost all the emails she sent to other departments from mid-2009 to mid-2011.

Bill MoyersHe titled his article Don’t let net neutrality become another broken promise, an allusion to President Obama’s plethora of broken promises. He details not only Obama appointee FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s conflicts of interests, but those of Wheeler’s lieutenants, who are also directly connected to the companies they are supposed to regulate. You can sense Bill’s deep disappointment that Mr. Obama has betrayed him. Et tu, Barry!

Like this:

Leo Laporte yesterday aired a live audio interview with Ladar Levison, CEO and founder of Lavabit.

Last month, Mr. Levison made the headlines when he shut down his Dallas-based secure email service immediately after providing his company’s SSL keys (effectively, the company’s master keys) to the FBI in compliance with a federal court order. He posted this message on Lavabit’s home page:

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.

Levison expects his case to eventually reach the Supreme Court. Some snippets from yeesterday’s interview:

Law enforcement is necessary. It’s a difficult job. Surveillance is supposed to be difficult. When it’s easy, we have a police state.

Like this:

I listened to an October 10 Cato Institute Event during which Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), who authored the original Patriot Act, declared that ‘There has been a failure of oversight’. He’s authoring the “USA Freedom Act”, which (finally!) reins in the NSA, FBI, and other agencies who’ve violated the Fourth Amendment.

I can say that if Congress knew what the NSA had in mind in the future immediately after 9/11, the Patriot Act never would have passed, and I never would have supported it. We have to have a balance of security and civil liberties. What the NSA has done, with the concurrence of both the Bush and Obama administrations, is completely forgotten about the guarantees of civil liberties that those of us who helped write the Patriot Act in 2001 and the reauthorization in 2005 and 2006 had written the law to prevent from happening.

Here’s a good Guardian article on Sensenbrenner, the Patriot Act, and the “USA Freedom Act”.

Sensenbrenner’s awakening is fine, but he’s closing the barn door after the horses have fled. Non-American governments and companies are moving their data and services off of servers that are surveilled by US agencies and/or controlled by US courts. I don’t blame them. The NSA’s over-reach is killing the whole “cloud” idea — who in his right mind would move his data off of his own computers to servers that you know are being read by the US federal government?

Congress slept rather than oversee the NSA and FBI and now it’s waking up to its responsibilities. It’s too late, boys. The world is moving in a different direction and the US with its arrogant and naïve agencies isn’t aboard that train. You had your chance and you blew it.

Meanwhile, back in the trenches

Three movements are underway by computer security techies:

Internet tech organizations are moving the Internet out from under US oversight

Improvement of Internet security, eliminating any third parties in authentication protocols

Creation of a secure Internet ver 2.0. It may or may not be built upon the existing TCP/IP foundation.

Like this:

ICANN, The World Wide Web Consortium, IETF, and other organizations are unhappy with NSA’s spying on users of the Internet. They plan to move the functions of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) out from under US oversight.

One unintended consequence of the NSA and FBI’s lying, spying, and violation of citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights is that whatever governance the U.S. had over the Internet will be lost. It’s likely that China, Russia, Iran, et al will rush into the breach. This is not good news for an open Internet.

This is another story whose conclusion is that our federal government — in this case the FBI — has done its best to prevent American citizens from having any privacy. Rather than defend the Constitution and its Bill Of Rights that these guys swore they’d protect, they try to find ways to nullify it.

Do you find this depressing? Read on.
When presented with a demand to (1) turn over Lavabit’s security certificate to the feds and (2) allow them to tap Lavabit’s pipe to and from the Internet, Mr. Levison was free to say “No”. He had to shut down his service, but he could tell the feds to take a hike.

Larger corporations with publicly traded shares (this includes banks) don’t have that freedom. We can assume that AT&T, Verizon, Google, Facebook, Apple, et al, when presented with similar government demands, have caved. Their shareholders would demand it. (We KNOW that AT&T caved.) Therefore, that cozy closed hasp padlock symbol in your browser’s address bar means nothing when visiting a US-based company’s website. The federal government can see everything.

Like this:

Posts navigation

Categories

Archives

Gordon Welchman was an Englishman who, while working on decoding German messages at Bletchley Park during World War II, invented traffic analysis. His idea was that even if one couldn’t decipher message contents, just tabulating who messaged whom, when, and how frequently, lent knowledge about the enemy.

After the war, he emigrated to America, where he became an American citizen and taught the first computer course at M.I.T. He worked for Remington Rand and eventually for the MITRE Corporation, where he enhanced traffic analysis technology and helped develop C3 (Command, Control, and Communication) systems.

Following the publication of his book The Hut Six Story in 1982, which detailed the work of his Hut Six group at Bletchley Park, his security clearance was revoked. This killed his career in intelligence.

Well, both snowboarding and skiing. Reminds me of water skiing. The middle east coast states received buckets of snow this weekend and these New Yorkers made the best of it. Yes, that looks like Broadway in Times Square.

“It re-writes the history of technology.”

I love this parody. It’s a humorous advertisement for your own mail server:

Do you run a government agency but hate complying with the law? Then you need DC Matic, the Hillary Clinton-approved email server!

credit: Written and performed by Remy. Video directed and edited by Meredith Bragg

What’s Hillary hiding? Classified emails? Sure. Evidence of her negligence in Benghazi that led to the murders of US citizens? Of course. Security breaches via assistant Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood connections? Probably. No, the ticking time bomb in this server is bribery. Maybe treason as well. She’s hiding written evidence of her deals that traded State Department help in exchange for large donations to the Clinton Foundation and large fees for speaking engagements by Bill Clinton.

Both Swope and Obama were elected to office by fools who suffer from chronic white guilt.

In 1969, Putney Swope announced:

The changes I’m gonna make will be minimal. I’m not gonna rock the boat. Rockin’ the boat’s a drag. What you do is sink the boat.

In 2008, Barack Obama bragged:

. . . we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

Mr. Obama is trying to transform America, alright. Transform it from a prosperous capitalist economy governed by a constitutional republic to a bankrupt socialist economy governed by a corrupt tyrannical dictatorship. Barack is following Putney’s credo, “What you do is sink the boat.”

The tune, “Slow Down”, is performed on piano and sung by its composer, Larry Williams. He was from New Orleans (of course). The tune, ringing with ninth chords, was released on disc in 1958. I think that the dancers are from a 1950s Hollywood rock & roll movie. Larry also composed Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Bad Boy, and Bony Moronie — classic rock tunes, all. He was born in 1935 and died on this date, January 7, in 1980.

In the mid-1950s, Williams inherited star billing from Little Richard (who’d forsaken rock and roll for religion) at New Orleans’ record label Specialty Records.

While Williams was alive, the Beatles paid their respects by admirably covering Larry’s Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Slow Down, and Bad Boy. I’m amazed that Larry Williams isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Extra credit assignment: Compare and contrast the Beatles’ cover of Slow Down with Larry Williams’ original. This clip includes the fab four wailing in Liverpool’s Cavern Club: (If YouTube has taken down this video clip, you can hear the same recording with groovy rock and roll clips (sorry — requires Flash) from 1950s America and early Beatles. Sorry for the Flash format.)

I’m delighted to discover that the video of Joni Mitchell’s classic Shadows and Light concert (1980) can be viewed in full (1h 13m) on YouTube. Supporting players are Jaco Pastorius on bass, Pat Metheny on guitar, Michael Brecker on sax, Don Alias on drums, Lyle Mays on keyboards, and The Persuasions. It’s among my favorite videos of a concert performance.

Jaco Pastorius

Jaco was a Fort Lauderdale kid who began playing in rock bands around town in a variety of clubs: She, The 4 O’Clock CLub, The Village Zoo, The Flying Machine, The Button, Bachelors III, Ocean Mist . . . When I first heard Jaco in the early 1970s, he was playing bass for straight-ahead local rock bands. He graduated to more jazz- and fusion- related music and put his unique fretless Fender bass stamp on Weather Report. I’ve heard bass players tell me that they tried to imitate Jaco’s technique, but gave up trying; they claim that Jaco changed what it meant to play electric bass guitar. Jaco’s friend Pat Metheny, who plays a beautiful lead guitar in this concert, is a University of Miami music school graduate.

Jaco seemed to still have his act together when he played this concert. Wikipedia has a good Jaco biography. He had a rapid rise to the top followed by a quick ride back down again. I had musician friends c 1984-87 who were torn up watching their friend Jaco dismantle his life. This Warner Brothers recording artist and Down Beat Hall of Fame member was sleeping on park benches and shooting baskets in a local public park.

Michael Brecker and Don Alias died a few years ago.

This is a classic performance by master musicians who were at the top of their games. Too bad it couldn’t last forever.

According to Rolling Stone magazine, the FCC is considering disciplining NBC for airing an indecent performance on July 6, Miley Cyrus’ “Bangerz Tour”. I watched it. It was provocative, but artful. Bertolt Brecht would have loved the production: live dancers against rear-projection oversized animation with creative costumes and lighting. I loved it. Some of the images, such as Miley riding a giant “Mr. Wiener”, were sexually suggestive.

Click to stream or download full 862 Megabyte video performance

The concert (recorded in Barcelona) reminded me of Madonna’s shows twenty-five years ago. Both performers have acceptable contralto voices, energetic dance skills, and assemble exciting Brechtian spectacles. I love the costuming and choreopgraphy. Shocking? “Bangerz” pushed the limits on prime-time American TV, I suppose. But that week on television, the atrocious performance by the Brazilian football team was truly shocking.

I’d prefer that the FCC take no action on this. They have enough serious issues on their plate already. Censoring art is, in my opinion, a slippery slope for any government agency . . . and I think that this production can be labeled “art”. Here’s the full show (862MB H264 1h 25m mp4 video file, 720 x 404 pixel) for download or streaming:

Click to stream or download full 862 Megabyte video performance

You’ll need a fast Internet connection to smoothly stream this. You might be better to download the file and then play it locally with a good video player such as VLC.

Is it Miley’s performance or just modern low distortion recording technique that for the first time makes John Lennon’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” lyrics (at 44m 35s) sound so . . . so . . . clear, logical, and complete?

I’ve worked with integrated circuits (I.C.s) since the 1960s, but haven’t been involved in their manufacture — only their application.

Intel Haswell wafer with a pin for scalephoto: Intel Free PressToday’s integrated circuit manufacture is a high stakes capital intensive business whose players use trade secrets to maintain their market advantage. I’ve never been inside an I.C. “fab” (factory), so it was a treat to find an hour-long presentation by an industry manufacturing engineer on YouTube. The technologies used at nano dimensions are mind-boggling.

Here’s the excellent presentation, in full:

The speaker mentions that lithographic imaging of the mask is now being done at 193 nanometer (nm). As you can see, we’re well above visible light and on our way to x-rays(!). Here’s the electromagnetic spectrum in that region:

Click for full-sizegraphic by: Shigeru23
The presentation is aimed at the layperson and is filled with surprises. For instance, one gigabyte of semiconductor memory can be produced on a flat substrate within the diameter of a human hair. I give it two (gloved) thumbs up.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. — Steve Jobs

I’m the one that’s gonna have to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to. — Jimi Hendrix

I just listened to an excellent interview with Walt Mossberg, who since 1991 wrote a weekly computer industry column for the Wall Street Journal. Walt’s now retired. Leo Laporte, an industry podcaster, coaxes some great stories from Mr. Mossberg.

Walt’s perspective was always that of a user — not a tech freak. Most industry reporters are techies who don’t appreciate that most of us don’t care about the inner workings and secret mechanisms of computers.

Walt speaks a bit about his long relationships with both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. (Walt sat in the passenger seat as Gates, frustrated by traffic, drove his Lexus for miles on the road’s shoulder.)

In the 1970s and early 1980s, I loved ABBA’s music. I was pleased to discover this recent critique, in both spoken and written form. I didn’t realize that ABBA were considered politically incorrect in their home country.

Intelligent Life magazine‘s Matthew Sweet observes that ABBA’s songs progressed from naiveté through sophistication to melancholy. As Matthew says, “Many of their songs are about accepting the failure of relationships”.

Here’s the companion article, Thank You for the Music, by Matthew Sweet, from a recent issue of Intelligent Life. Both the article and the audio clip stem from his visit to Stockholm’s ABBA Museum.

These observations will help you get the most from your swimming. (They’re from Australian podcast Effortless Swimming). Each is a short audio clip of less than ten minutes. (The first truth is that one or two swim workouts a week won’t cut it.)

Now that not just one, but two movies (Breaking The Code and The Imitation Game) have been produced about Alan Turing, it’s time we had a movie about Ada Lovelace. She seems to have possessed an unusual combination of precise reasoning and imagination, strong will, and feminine charm. Plus, she was in the middle of a tug o war between her feuding parents, poet Lord Byron and his wife Anne Isabella.

Why is Ada important? She’s acknowledged to be the first computer programmer (c 1840!). Like Mozart and Turing, her life was tragically cut short at a young age. I propose this biopic today because it’s Ada Lovelace Day!

If you’re using Windows 7 or 8.1, and you’re sick of being nagged by Microsoft’s pop-up to upgrade to Windows 10, go to the Ultimate Outsider website and download and install their GWX Control Panel. It’s received rave reviews. Cost: gratis. Here’s the full description.

New and Improved Method

Update, April 3, 2016: Steve Gibson, founder of GRC (Gibson Research Corp), has written a great little freeware utility that also blocks upgrades to Windows 10. Steve writes most of his code in assembler, so his utilities are tiny. He calls this newest utility Never10. He’s created a page dedicated to Never10, where you may download it for free. It’s only 81 kilobyes in size and doesn’t require installation on your Windows PC. You need just run it once to turn off upgrades to Windows 10, and run it again to allow upgrades to Windows 10. Short and sweet, it’s just what the doctor ordered.

Installing two or more application programs on a PC can chew up your time as you wade through web pages, download prompts that don’t always work, and questions and answers. Now ninite.com (http://ninite.com/) does this tedious work for you. I’ve tried it on a few PCs and it’s worked flawlessly. Install everything in one easy step on your brand-new Windows 7 PC!